Macroeconomic data such as trade balances and worldwide exports are based on past data and are published with a considerable time lag. Many types of macroeconomic data are generated using a trend following system that tracks trends in historical data. Therefore, current macroeconomic data only represents a previous economic state.
Additionally, many indicators of economic state are only relevant to a particular zone or country while others are only relevant to a particular industry or trade. Other indicators are based heavily on the sentiment of individuals (e.g. stock market indices, sentiment indices, diffusion indices, etc.), but are not directly tied to the global economic state. Current macroeconomic data and indicators therefore fail to provide reliable information regarding the global economic state.